As a service provider looks for new ways to achieve high quality and cost efficiency in the way they manage IT infrastructure for customers, an important emerging theme is the need to adopt a standard set of management tools and processes. This goal is complicated by the complex variety of customer environments and requirements, as well as the increasingly systems and networks located across the globe.
One recent strategy being pursued by IT service providers to address this challenge is to deploy a relatively small set of “best-of-breed” management tools that support multi-tenancy, i.e., single instance can support multiple customers. Multi-tenant tools have a number of important advantages in terms of cost and simplicity. They require deployment of a much smaller infrastructure, in contrast to having a dedicated installation for each customer, which can significantly reduce costs for the infrastructure hosting the tool itself. Moreover, in some cases, multi-tenant tools have more advantageous software licensing models, for example, with a single license used to manage multiple customers. Finally, multi-tenant tools are a crucial element of the higher-level goal of consolidating tools to reduce training, management and support costs.
A major barrier to adopting multi-tenant tools is that the desired management tool may not be designed for multiple customer environments. It usually requires significant effort to rewrite the tool in order to provide the needed support. Full multi-tenant support requires adequate, auditable protection against the risk of data leakage between customers. Performance of each tenant should meet the level provided in a single tenant case.
The prior art has shown no appreciation for the need to provide multi-tenancy capability in management software using virtualization technologies.